Traditional mail extraction and scanning systems have been described including the Extraction and Scanning System described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,196,393 B1, issued Mar. 6, 2000 to Kruk, Jr., et al. and incorporated by reference herein. In the Kruk system, documents are sequentially opened and scanned before the next document is opened in order to maintain transactional integrity in a single record file. The process of opening and scanning each mail piece delivered to a company is expensive and time consuming.
Conventional mail scanning and delivery systems utilize a manually operated process requiring that each mail piece be scanned into an electronic image form. Thereafter, an operator decides how to route the document. The operator may manually select the addressee name viewed on the document from an email recipient name database and then initiate a new mail message attaching the electronic image of the mail piece. The operator does not receive real time disposition instructions from the intended recipient.
In digital mail processing systems, the processes of opening, extracting, imaging, indexing and digitally delivering mail contents consumes significant resources requiring personnel and system resources. Additionally, indexing and storage or other disposition of the received physical mail pieces consumes resources. Each mail piece put through the mail digitizing system consumes resources and if the number of mail pieces processed were reduced, the resources used would decrease. Accordingly, there is a need for a system that will conserve resources by processing only those mail pieces that require processing.